Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

software.annas-archive.gl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 368 posts

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#171

Post by TFNA »

john-titor wrote: post #161
whycome wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?

Things have changed a lot since the late twentieth century. The kind of people you imagine, who can live full-time off writing, are responsible for a vanishingly small amount of the books that appear today. Piracy has little to do with it; this is primarily due to the fierce competition from other books, the glut of content available today, but especially from mobile phones as fewer and fewer people read books. Even for those who make appreciable income off books, the books are nevertheless usually a side gig alongside other hustles.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#172

Post by antonvs »

john-titor wrote: post #161
whycome wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?

You forgot to stipulate, “…living in an ultracapitalist country with no meaningful social safety net,” i.e. the USA.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#173

Post by fragmede »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #168
zerobees wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character…

There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity. I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren shou…

JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are.

Kind of weird too think about it that way, but food for thought.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#174

Post by spudlyo »

john-titor wrote: post #161
whycome wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?

Imagine that terrible time before Copyright existed, and there was no motivation for anyone to make art, literature, or music.

"What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing." --Arthur Schopenhauer

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#176

Post by xdennis »

cubefox wrote: post #134

HN logic: Training on copyrighted material --> bad Actually distributing copyrighted material --> good Needless to say, this is backwards. Any copyright holder will be much more worried about the latter.

It's all about what you actually care.

Piracy helps people who can't afford to pay or have no way of acquiring legally.

LLM training helps megacorps replace people.

If you side with common people against megacorops, you're okay with piracy and against LLM training on copyrighted works.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#177

Post by drnick1 »

fragmede wrote: post #173
dghlsakjg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity. I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren shou…

JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are. Kind of weird too th…

If most authors don't make much money, if any, then what is the point of copyright? It only really seems to benefit publishers.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#178

Post by dghlsakjg »

fragmede wrote: post #173
dghlsakjg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity. I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren shou…

JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are. Kind of weird too th…

Sure, but for the lower volume authors the royalties at year 20 are effectively 0. Most books don’t even sell out their first printing. Its a money grab to defend/prosecute copyright on a book that you couldn't even sell.

100+ year copyrights only help the descendants of the people that have already become extraordinarily wealthy. Cutting off at 2 decades would have close to 0 effect on the huge majority of creatives, while benefitting society immensely. JK Rowling would still be a billionaire, and small authors would be fine too.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#179

Post by edkennedy »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #35

https://SourceLibrary.org has about 16,000 rare books translated — most for the first time. 50,000 books archived (will be translated when we have $$ for it). More tokens than English Wikipedia and about .75 petabytes. Not sure if we will qualify for a bounty, but happy to share! Btw, we are looking for funding from small or large donors who want to help us translate the Renaissance…

beautiful work! the answers are relevant and poignant. thank you for building this. For funding, paid research api maybe?

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#180

Post by TurdF3rguson »

hedora wrote: post #15

I wonder how long it will be before they offer bounties for internet scrapes. Cloudflare captchas have made the internet unusable for me, and I'm sure it will only get worse over time. I'd much rather just browse (or even torrent) a copy of archive.is or similar. The latter would be much better for privacy, and hey, I run ad blockers anyway.

Someone on your network is likely playing one of the games that are monetized by bright data proxies, it was a thread on here a few days ago. It could be your smart TV. If you find the culprit and remove it there's a decent chance your ip reputation will improve enough to not see those captchas
Post reply on HN